Books: Track of the Grail

Vincent Sheean, veteran foreign correspondent, sat in Vermont in the
summer of 1947 and pored over Marx, Freud and Einstein with the
earnestness of a junior getting up a term paper. His purpose, says
Sheean, was to arrive at a formula that would explain away the
appearance of God or destiny that had forced itself on his attention in
human affairs. After "very bitter suffering," he arrived at this: "The
concatenation of the circumstances sometimes, or even quite often,
becomes snarled in a way which produces indications of pattern in the
incidence of the...